…and Other Unlikely Places

“When anyone challenges this story or thinks that I didn’t try to put the whole story out there, I’m like, ‘You know what? I bled for this thing,’”
Jason Hall on a wrestling confrontation with a Navy SEAL while researching American SniperTime magazine article by Eliana Dockterman

Here’s a little background on screenwriter Jason Hall on his road to writing American Sniper which to date has made over $375 million at the worldwide box office and earned six Oscar nominations including best screenplay.

“I sought out Hall because I find it instructive to see how a guy with one screen credit (2009’s Spread) and another coming (an adaption of the Joseph Finder novel Paranoia) gets white-hot so quickly. Every writer’s trajectory is different, but there’s a common thread: there is no such thing as an overnight success screenwriter. It’s years of struggle to find a voice, and then maybe a lucky break. Hall came to Hollywood to be an actor, and only found his way to screenwriting because things were going so badly. ‘I did TV parts in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and other shows, playing the bad guy or the MacGuffin bad guy, with the half-baked mustache,’ Hall told me. ‘I would read these terrible movie scripts, and I couldn’t get auditions. I thought, maybe I could write a terrible script for myself.'”Mike Fleming Jr.Deadline article How Jason Hall Went From Struggling Actor To Hot Screenwriter With American Sniper And Two More Deals Coming

P.S. If you read the whole Deadline article you’ll discover that Hall actually got into a second physical confrontation while doing fact-finding on Chris Kyle’s life. It helps that Hall is 6’3″ and wrestled in his youth because I don’t think any film schools or writing workshops include wrestling as part of their curriculum. It’s also worth noting that Hall wrestled with the story for three years before turning in the American Sniper script. And since Hall is 42-years-old, I’d guess that his journey to wild Hollywood success took about 20 years.

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“I want my movies to be about regular people that are caught up in extraordinary moments in their lives, usually by their own doing. It’s not like a meteor movie where something’s coming from space that the people had nothing to do with. The characters have to either go right or left—there’s no option for them to stay where they are.”Writer/director J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, A Most Violent Year)Film Comment interview with Emma Myer

Damien Chazelle has a few things in common with Diabo Cody. Both are screenwriter/directors, both have cool names with the initials D.C., and both were 29-years-old when they received their first Oscar nominations for solo credited screenplays with single world titles. (She for Juno and he for Whiplash).

A film critic after interviewing Cody said she was ‘wicked smart,” and Chazelle graduated from Harvard (and his father—a Yale graduate— is a professor a Princeton). We’ll know in a couple of weeks if Chazelle walks away with an Oscar like Cody did seven years ago.

But there is one more similarity that I’d like to point out—they both had a long creative history before their breakthrough Hollywood success. Cody said she’d written everyday (short stories, poems, etc.) since she was 12-years-old, and Chazelle had even an earlier start by making films when he was elementary school age.

“I always wanted to make movies. Basically, there’s nothing else I ever wanted to do. So it just became a matter early on of figuring out how I was gonna do that. You and I were talking last night about some of my early masterpieces with my dad’s shitty camcorder, just making little movies with friends in my house…. I was too young to know how to actually operate the camera, so I would just stage stuff and have my dad shoot it. My dad got sick of that really quickly. He never really liked it to begin with, and he started messing up the shots and at a certain point I realized, as a lot of actors actually often do, that I’d be better off getting behind the camera. So, I was in fourth or fifth grade when I started actually getting behind the camera.”
Damien ChazelleIssue Magazine interview with Whiplash actor Miles Teller

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Screenwriter Damien Chazelle didn’t really write Whiplash straight out of Harvard University—he’d actually sold a few spec scripts after he graduated with a degree Visual & Environmental Sciences. He’d even had a couple of features produced from his scripts. But it wasn’t until after he tapped into his own experience as competitive jazz ensemble drummer in high school that he became an Oscar-nominated screenwriter.

“[Whiplash] was the most personal thing I’d ever written—the most embarrassing in that sense as well. It sounds very cliche to say this but it was that kind of pouring out on the page sort of thing. And wrote it very quickly and kinda put it in a drawer, and was too embarrassed to show it to anyone for a while because I didn’t like what it said about myself. And then tinkered with it a little bit and finally got up the courage to show it to a few people and then it sort of became, ‘okay, let’s try to actually make this.’ But it started out more as just a, ‘This [other script’s] not working I need to just do something completely different, I’m going to write what happened to me as a drummer.”Screenwriter Damien Chazelle on his screenplay WhiplashDP/30 Interview

P.S. The day after the New England Patriots won their fourth Super Bowl it seems fitting to have a Boston/Cambridge related post. If you go back to 2008 post Screenwriting from Massachusettsyou’ll find that Chazelle joins of list of at least 20 writers who attended Harvard and had their work end up as movies.

“I grew up in the Compton/Lynwood area of Los Angeles. My family has no connection with the entertainment industry at all except that I had a very beloved aunt named Denise who was a lover of the arts, of film and music and theater and literature. She gifted me with an appreciation for it all. But she was truly a ferocious movie watcher and fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of film. How she got it is really just through the atmosphere, because there was no one ahead of her to introduce her to the arts, but luckily she was there for me. I spent many an afternoon, getting picked up from school going straight to a movie. Long conversations about film and books and art. It was really all a gift from my aunt to me.”Director Ava DuVernay (Selma)Interview with Scott Myers/Go Into The Story

P.S. I’ve said before that you can live not far from the Hollywood sign in West Covina, California and feel like you’re in West Des Moines, Iowa. The Compton/Lynwood area only about 20 miles south of the Hollywood sign would be low on the list for places in Los Angeles County where you would bet on someone rising to a filmmaking career in Hollywood. (Though an abundance of rappers and professional athletes are from the area. NWA/Straight Outta Compton. NFL great Richard Sherman playing for Seattle in the Super Bowl this Sunday was born in Compton.) I spent some time in and around Compton/Lynwood in the early 80s while working as a photographer in nearby Cerritos. Gritty would be a word to describe it then. At least back then—and when DuVernay was in high school— the area was known for it’s heavy presence of African-American and Hispanic gangs.

I hope Ava DuVernay’s (@AVAETC) filmmaking success is an inspiration to all of you who come from or live in “unlikely places.” But make sure you read the full interview at the Go Into the Story blog (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) to see the many steps she took to write and direct movies.

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“To tell you the truth, I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I really try not to do that. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and, as I’ve said, go with the moment and go with my guts. It’s different than when you’re playing games or trying to be clever. To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you’re writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can’t lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves. And that’s something I don’t see in a lot of Hollywood movies. I see characters lying all the time. They can’t do this because it would affect the movie this way or that or this demographic might not like it. To me a character can’t do anything good or bad, they can only do something that’s true or not.”Two-time Oscar winning screenwriter Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained)Creative Screenwriting Magazine interview by Erik Bauer

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In my last post I wrote about Missouri’s influence on Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson, and how he wrote his first play during lunchtime while working at an ad agency in Chicago. But those weren’t the only things that shaped him as a writer. When Wilson was 26-years-old he moved to New York City in […]